(Un)learn (Re)search
Role: Researcher, Designer
THE CHALLENGE
Contextualize students’ lack of motivation in the RtD(Research through design) process and its relation with search experiences.
Contextualize students’ lack of motivation in the RtD(Research through design) process and its relation with search experiences.
THE OUTCOME
A weekly unlearning workshop for thesis class to help researchers and learners clarify their essential visions and potential bias.
A weekly unlearning workshop for thesis class to help researchers and learners clarify their essential visions and potential bias.
Background storyAs one of the leading design programs in New York, the MFA in Communications Design at Pratt Institute sits at the intersection of visual language, cultural criticism, and media studies and encourages the students to approach design as a process of cross-disciplinary learning, a communal experience, and a strategy to enact change. However, in an increasingly technological knowledge-making environment, students over drowned and get lost while connecting different contexts, disciplines, and technologies with inertial thinking and research tools. As a graduate student of Pratt and a design researcher, I dig into students’ design research routines and experiences with tools to break through the inertial cycle of learners.
Survey
I reached out to 15 design research learners 23-26 years old and studying their second year in the communication design graduate program at Pratt to learn about their interpretation of research experience.
“research = 🥲🙁, search, learn, know = 😃🙂”
“Disconnection between ‘doing’ and ‘being’ ”
Immersion
To further observe their research journey and difficulties, I collected and mapped out the steps and actions of learners.
“We need more small group conversation to ask and contextualize.”
“As design researchers, we use tools for structuring insights, instead of knowing everything.”
Design brief
My research shows that, esearch learners in design graduate school lean toward “search” by technology and assumption to get answers instead of rethinking questions. Learners often linger around browsing, searching, and googling.
To stimulate curiosity and reflection in research learners in the RtD process, I made a workshop method to interfere the inertial thinking process.
(Un)learn (Re)search: An in-class workshop for unlearning and rethinking the research process.
︎︎︎Time range preference for (Un)learn (Re)search exercise.